Marquez’s strength coach Angel Heredia deserves a trophy for his great job in Pacquiao fight

By Chris Williams: Angel Heredia, the strength and conditioning coach for Juan Manuel Marquez, deserves a trophy for his excellent work in building up the punching power and overall conditioning for the 39-year-old Marquez for his last fight against Manny Pacquiao last December.

With Heredia’s help, Marquez was able to transform his body and build incredible power that enabled him to knock Pacquiao down twice in beating him by a 6th round knockout on December 8th. We started to see Heredia’s great work at play on Marquez’s 3rd fight with Pacquiao in November 2011 in a fight where Marquez’s punching power was suddenly better than Pacquiao’s own.

This was a reversal of the first two fights where Pacquiao was always the harder puncher of the, and we saw this in his four knockdowns of Marquez. However, Pacquiao went into his third fight with Marquez seemingly confident that he’d be the stronger guy and that he’d try to overpower him like he’d attempted to do without success in the first two fights. But Pacquiao quickly found out that Marquez was now too strong and too dangerous for him to slug it out.

The power gap between the two fighters widened further in the fourth fight with Marquez making huge leap up in power to where he was able to hurt Pacquiao with almost everything he threw in the fight. You can watch Pacquiao’s reaction in slow motion each he was hit by a hard shot from Marquez and you can see that the punches were really doing a number on the Filipino. Marquez didn’t really land all that many punches in the first five rounds, because if he had the fight likely would have ended well before the 6th.

Heredia’s work in getting Marquez ready for this was out of this world. If you look at the difference in Marquez’s punching power between the 2nd and 3rd fights you can see he made a big leap up. But incredibly Marquez was still able to make further improvements after his third fight with his power. It wasn’t as much as between the 2nd and 3rd fights, but it was still a big step up in power and Pacquiao wasn’t ready for it.